If Donald Trump winds up gifting the two Georgia Senate seats to the Democrats – turning the chamber blue, to the benefit of President-elect Biden – I will laugh my Ossoff.
But the best of all possible scenarios is by no means guaranteed tonight. Georgia hasn’t elected a Democratic senator since 1996, and even though the state’s electorate is far more racially and ethnically diverse than it was a quarter century ago (with huge help from Stacey Abrams), I have a hard time believing that Jon Ossoff and Rev. Raphael Warnock can win a double-header.
But if those Dems do pull it off – the massive record-setting early vote reportedly tilted blue – some of the credit should go to Trump for screwing his own party. On the eve of the twin special election, with incumbent Republican plutocrats David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler hanging on by their well-manicured fingernails, and with control of the Senate hanging in the balance, the one-term loser was still spewing his mixed message that maybe his credulous cultists shouldn’t bother to vote at all.
On the one hand, he said at a rally last night, the Georgia election is critically important: “These Senate seats are truly the last line of defense.” But they’re only “the last line of defense” against Joe Biden, the next president – but Trump quickly added that he still doesn’t accept the fact that Joe Biden is the next president (“I don’t concede”). He then launched into a lengthy rant about himself, about how the Georgia presidential tally was rigged against him – thereby signaling to his fans (whether intended or not) that it’s a waste of time for them to vote in a rigged election. But still, he implored them to vote today – even though he was simultaneously lying nonstop in his sustained attack against the democratic process. And even though, just three days earlier, he’d tweeted that the Georgia Senate contests were “illegal and invalid.”
As he nonsensically told Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger in his now-infamous Saturday phone call, “You have a big election coming up and because of what you’ve done to this president – you know, the people of Georgia know that this was a scam. Because of what you’ve done to the president, a lot of people aren’t going out to vote and a lot of Republicans are going to vote negative because they hate what you did to the president. OK?”
It’s not worth parsing all the lies in that paragraph. Suffice it to say that if Ossoff and Warnock win, these truths will be self-evident: that Trump depressed red turnout (indeed, Republicans are reportedly worried about the conservative rural strongholds); and that he ginned up blue turnout (the unprecedented number of early voters were reportedly more racially diverse than Georgia’s November electorate, and the once-solidly red Atlanta suburbs have turned purple thanks to Trump).
How historic it would be if a once-solidly red state, on the same night, sent a 33-year-old Jew and a Black preacher to the Senate. President-elect Biden, in his own Georgia rally yesterday, was happy to drive blue turnout by stoking anti-Trump animus: “I don’t know why he still wants the job (when) he doesn’t want to do the work.”
Still, let’s not get carried away about history in the making. As we learned in November, Republicans turn out heavily on election day; they vote in person because mail ballots are for Covid sissies. And while many of them do drink Trump’s “stolen election” Kool-Aid, they may well be sufficiently motivated to keep the Senate red just in case Biden gets sworn in. And with respect to Rev. Warnock, it’s worth noting that, thus far, voters in the former Confederate states have sent a grand total of zero Black Democrats to the Senate.
Biden arguably overstated his own case yesterday – “One state can chart the course not just for the next four years, but for the next generation” – because even if Ossoff and Warnock put the Democrats in charge (50-50 chamber, with veep Kamala Harris as the tie-breaking vote), Biden’s most progressive proposals may still get a rough ride. The filibuster is alive and well, meaning that his agenda will often need 60 votes, and a number of moderate Democratic senators may be tough to corral anyway.
But the alternative – Mitch McConnell, reprising his role of Grim Reaper – would be far worse. The ideal verdict tonight – for America, for our fragile democratic process – would be a blue blowout. But, dare I say it, we shouldn’t be shocked if we get twin cliffhangers that necessitate more days and weeks of recounts.
I can’t even. Neither can you.